Last summer I made a commitment to avoid making major changes to my flipping systems, and I ended up being pretty successful with that. Before this summer vacation began, I personally pledged to avoid all curriculum planning in July. Without knowing yet what I might gain from attending FTEC18, I decided to give myself these weeks for reconsidering my class routines and even my overall flipping approach. (Later this month, I will attend a statewide workshop about the new Mass. standards for 8th grade, and that should give me some curriculumguidance for units, lessons, videos for September and beyond. Why make plans now that could get replaced or outmoded very soon? In August, it's game on!)

This week I've had a feeling that makes me empathize with teachers who resist or avoid the flipped-classroom pedagogy. Shields up! I feel myself circling the wagons and pulling into my shell. It seems almost instinctual ... which is weird because I'm not usually like this. What is going on inside my brain?! I dunno, so let's blog about it and see where this goes.

I respect the hell out of Dave Walsh, Matt Moore, Kevin Hogendorp, and all the other folks who entered this story last night during an ad hoc moderator-free #flipclasschat. The main topic was nonlinear / asynchronous teaching:

Matthew Moore offered applicable advice for history teaching: "I call attention to examining multiple perspectives of the same hist event. time is linear but the interchange of ideas & perspectives of that linear event are more intertwined & create a knot of existence that may not have definite beginning and end. " Kevin also chimed in with a few nuggets, including: "Teaching thematically allows for this. It also can expose Ss to many events in same time period in different areas."

My brain swiftly jumps to excuses/reasons/obstacles:

It seems complicated to set this up!

What are the students doing during class, if many of them are working at different paces on different topics?

How would this work for my students with special needs?

I don't see how this fits for history, because students need to know some things in a chronological sequence.

Maybe it's good for high-school kids, but my 8th-graders would probably struggle.

Pretty quickly, I acknowledged the irony. These are also 5 common complaints/concerns against flipping! The time to create videos, the mystery of class time, the diversity of students, the subject-specific issues, the kids' maturity level. Even though I think flipping is great, some audiences only consider the challenges to their status quo. "Maybe that's good for you, but I'm just gonna keep doing my own thing." To some degree this response is healthy, right? Right?!? I mean, if we all just latch onto every new teaching idea that we hear, then we would be constantly revising and replacing our systems. We would never get really good at anything. We would never make it our own. We might exhaust ourselves (and our students, and maybe our families!) with neverending changes. I like a lot of what I already do. I have ample student-survey data to support those systems, and over the years I have refined and tweaked them for improvement. It's not like I never make changes (even last year when I promised myself to hold the line!). From the very beginning, I have adopted this method because flipping solves & prevents problems which my students and I suffered in the traditional homework/classwork structure. So even though I could make some significant systemic changes to satisfy my curiosity, I'm not at all yet convinced that I should. The wise words of Ian Malcolm have been popping into my head lately (paraphrased below).

So now we come to the big question: Do I have problems that nonlinear / asynchronous teaching could fix? At this moment I still don't think so.... but my mind reminds open. Perhaps my upcoming curriculum shift (more civics, less history) will cause problems that this approach could resolve. Maybe I will get a brainstorm that makes everything click into place. Certainly I will continue this conversation with Dave, Matt, Kevin, Kate, Joy, Carolina, and all the other curious & supportive #flipclass folks.

We still have almost 4 weeks left to go until the students' last day on June 24th. Many colleagues and friends in Georgia, Colorado, and elsewhere are ending their school year in May, but I still have 15 more teaching days (not including 8th grade graduation ceremony & rehearsal, the theme park field trip, and Step-Up Day). Worst of all, they already had their year-end trip (3 days in New York City) before Memorial Day, so academics were interrupted for a week. Who wants to do school for another month?!

So for the 3rd year, I'm ending the year with a TLAP-style Civil War unit. This was inspired by the Interact Simulations "Civil War" booklet, but we ditched some elements and revised some others for a flipping awesome ending to the year.

Every student wears a badge with the name of a real-life Civil War soldier. Half of them represent men from a unit that mustered in our school's city: Newton Massachusetts. The other names match a regiment that enlisted near Newton Alabama. (Yeah, this took a long time to research, but I will definitely recycle this unit in future years!) So we have "Union soldiers" and "Confederate soldiers," but in class I avoid substantive conflict between the students' characters. The Alabama kids will never be asked to support slavery, and I discourage any attempts to speak with a Southern drawl. At first, each student's character has the rank of "Private." (I am and always shall be a Lieutenant General.) One of my secondary learning objectives is military rank hierarchy -- an area of general knowledge. I also need to keep them engaged on these warm June days! So they are always working for promotion to a higher rank:

The "Combat Cards" that were mentioned in the Promotion Checklist is a simple card game like War, except instead of aces and jacks they have military term like musket and mortar, or platoon and brigade.* Students get to play several times a week, and the faster they learn the values of each term, the faster they play the game, and the more quickly they can win cards! I will also have them work in small groups sometimes to quiz other groups on Civil War knowledge; that's how they gain Morale Points.

Also, the promotions help to power the flipping element of the Civil War unit. There are three sets of essential understandings that I expect all students to gain:

describe several causes of the war (not just slavery!)

disprove several myths about the war (like "Lincoln freed all the slaves")

That is what the videos are for. These will be my last 3 assessments of the year, and I will use the same system of quizzes and retakes for accountability (related post). The one little twist is that I'm going to try asynchronous flipping: Students can take the quiz whenever they feel ready -- no assigned due-dates. I plan to provide 15-20 minutes of quiet time every class period for students to take an assessment OR prepare for their next quiz OR for independent research. I trust that the desire for rank promotion will spur many students forward. If this is a terrible disaster then I can assign official quiz dates for the last week of school, but I really want to give it a shot. I will keep you posted!* The Combat Cards come directly from the Interact Simulations "Civil War" unit, so I must give full credit to its authors.

Who is this flipping guy?!

Andrew Swan just finished year 18 of teaching middle school (currently 8th-grade US History/Govt in a Boston suburb). Previously he has taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grade English, ancient history, & geography in Maine and in Massachusetts. This was Andrew's 5th year of flipping all direct instruction, so we have more class time for simulations, deep discussions, analyzing primary sources ... and also to promote mastery for students at all levels. His 8th-grade daughter, 10th-grade son, and wonderful wife all indulge Andrew's blogging, tweeting, & other behaviors. These include co-moderating the #sschat Twitter sessions and Facebook page. ​Andrew does not always refer to himself in the third-person. Twitter: @flipping_A_tchrInstagram: aswan802